Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2017
From ACM Opinion
Are Computers Already Smarter Than Humans?
Who's smarter—you, or the computer or mobile device on which you're reading this article? The answer is increasingly complex, and depends on definitions in flux.
From ACM Opinion
Red-Pilled: My Bizarre Week sing the Alt-Right's Vision of the Internet
Scroll with me here. Somebody named BeatlesBaby makes "a very badass chicken curry." Look, there's a nice sepia-tinted pencil drawing of Ned Stark from Game of Thrones.
From ACM News
The Coming Software Apocalypse
There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service.
From ACM Opinion
What, Exactly, Were Russians Trying to Do With Those Facebook Ads?
Many questions remain about the ads purchased by Russian-linked accounts during the 2016 presidential election.
From ACM Careers
Europe Is Designing a New Particle Collider to Take On China
CERN, the European nuclear physics research organization, is contemplating the development of a particle accelerator three times larger than the Large Hadron Collider that confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, a move intended…
From ACM Opinion
Is Beaming Down In star Trek a Death Sentence?
In the 2009 movie Star Trek, Captain Kirk and Sulu plummeted down toward the planet Vulcan without a parachute. "Beam us up, beam us up!" Kirk shouted in desperation.
From ACM Opinion
Facebook's Belated Awakening
Chastened by criticism that Facebook had turned a blind eye to Russia's manipulation of the social network to interfere in the 2016 election, the company's executives now acknowledge a need to do better and have promised to be…
From ACM Opinion
Facebook's Ad Scandal Isn't a 'fail,' It's a Feature
What does it take to advertise on Facebook to people who openly call themselves "Jew haters" and want to know "how to burn Jews"? About $10 and 15 minutes, according to what the investigative nonprofit ProPublica recently uncovered…
From ACM Opinion
I Helped Create Facebook's Ad Machine. Here's How I'd Fix It
This month, two magnificently embarrassing public-relations disasters rocked the Facebook money machine like nothing else in its history.
From ACM Opinion
Why Futurist Ray Kurzweil Isn't Worried About Technology Stealing Your Job
Longtime futurist Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, provides his take on the artificial intelligence debate and what the future holds for us all.
From ACM News
These Robots Can Merge and Split Their Brains to Form New Modular Bots
We cover all kinds of modular robotics around here, and when we do, we're almost always talking about one overall robotic system made up of many different modules, some number of which can be individually controlled or swapped…
From ACM Careers
Remembering Lotfi Zadeh, the Inventor of Fuzzy Logic
One night in July, 1964, the logician Lotfi Zadeh found himself alone in his parents' New York apartment, his dinner plans cancelled.
From ACM Opinion
Is There Any Hope For Facebook's Fact-Checking Efforts?
Facebook's fact-checking efforts are on the rocks.
From ACM Opinion
Software Has a Serious Supply-Chain Security Problem
The warnings consumers hear from information security pros tend to focus on trust: Don't click web links or attachments from an untrusted sender.
From ACM Opinion
Cassini Vanishes Into Saturn, Its Mission Celebrated and Mourned
NASA&'s Cassini spacecraft, the intrepid robotic explorer of Saturn's magnificent beauty, ended a journey of 20 years on Friday like a shooting star streaking across Saturn's sky.
From ACM Opinion
Why It's a Real Mistake to Count on a Cellphone When You Go Hiking
Sarah Savage was alone in the woods and didn't know which way to turn.
From ACM Opinion
The Father Of Mobile Computing Is Not Impressed
He influenced Jobs and dreamed up a digital future designed for learning and thinking. Fifty years on, Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true.
From ACM Opinion
Apple's Faceid Could Be a Powerful Tool For Mass Spying
This Tuesday Apple unveiled a new line of phones to much fanfare, but one feature immediately fell under scrutiny:FaceID, a tool that would use facial recognition to identify individuals and unlock their phones.
From ACM Opinion
You Are Already Living Inside a Computer
Suddenly, everything is a computer. Phones, of course, and televisions. Also toasters and door locks, baby monitors and juicers, doorbells and gas grills. Even faucets. Even garden hoses. Even fidget spinners.
From ACM Opinion
Q&a: The AI Composer
Computer scientist Luc Steels uses artificial intelligence to explore the origins and evolution of language.
From ACM Opinion
Why Google's AI Can Write Beautiful Songs but Still Can't Tell a Joke
Creating noodling piano tunes and endless configurations of cat drawings with AI may not sound like an obvious project for Google, but it makes a lot of sense to Douglas Eck.
From ACM Opinion
Why the Iphone X's Face Id Is a Terrible Way to Secure Your Data
The new iPhone X puts face recognition front and centre. Why? Because it is the quickest and easiest way to unlock your phone.
From ACM Opinion
What We Know About the Climate Change-Hurricane Connection
With Texas just beginning to recover from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey and the Southeastern U.S. preparing for Hurricane Irma's iminent arrival, people are naturally asking the question: What role might human-caused…
From ACM Opinion
The Only Safe Email Is text-Only email
It's troubling to think that at any moment you might open an email that looks like it comes from your employer, a relative or your bank, only to fall for a phishing scam.
From ACM Opinion
These Are Not the Robots We Were Promised
From the moment we humans first imagined having mechanical servants at our beck and call, we've assumed they would be constructed in our own image.
From ACM Opinion
How Facebook Changed the Spy Game
Any doubt that Russia has been running a strategically targeted disinformation campaign in the United States was erased on Wednesday, when Facebook revealed that it had deleted 470 "inauthentic" accounts that were based in Russia…
From ACM Opinion
Irobot Ceo Colin Angle on Data Privacy and Robots in the Home
About a month ago, iRobot CEO Colin Angle mentioned something about sharing Roomba mapping data in an interview with Reuters.
From ACM Opinion
Mark Sagar Made a Baby in His Lab. Now It Plays the Piano
People get up to weird things in New Zealand.
From ACM Opinion
How to Close the Gender Gap in Tech
Why do so few women work in tech? It isn't that they can't do math or are biologically unsuited to the tasks.
From ACM Opinion
Tech's phill Political Battle to Save the Daca Dreamers
The U.S. tech industry is leading the charge to pressure Congress to pass a bill to protect so-called "Dreamers" from deportation. Experts say the fight is an uphill battle.